“He [Jonas] felt surprisingly, no fear, nor any regret at leaving the community behind. But he felt a very deep sadness that he had left his closest friend behind.” (page 153). If Jonas’ community was a utopian society, why would he have left?
In the novel The Giver, by Lois Lowry, Jonas lives in a world without color, love, individuality, memories, and pain. As captivating as it sounds, a world without these qualities seems flavorless to me. Restricted to the extent that they isolate a single person to bear all the memories of the past, including the gruesome ones. This selected person is called the Receiver of Memory. In due course, after Jonas (the main protagonist in The Giver) becomes the Receiver of Memory, his eyes are opened to the opportunities he could have with these aspects as
…show more content…
The community that Jonas lives in has limited choice, freedom, individuality, and knowledge. While some may argue that limiting these qualities benefit order and peace, I believe that these qualities are necessary for a community to flourish.
My first evidential piece are choice and freedom. In The Giver, the community restricts freedom, which paramount life choices. Lois Lowry discovers freedom in her Newbery Award Acceptance speech. “I have a bicycle. Again and again… I ride my bicycle out the gate that surrounds our comfortable, familiar, safe American community. I ride down a hill because I am curious and I enter, riding down that hill, an unfamiliar, slightly uncomfortable perhaps even unsafe… area of Tokyo that throbs with life.” (page 172). Lowry lived in Tokyo with her family for several years in an American community. She asked her mom, why they had lived in the American community instead of the Japanese community. Her mother stated “we lived where we did because it was comfortable. It was familiar. It was safe.” (page 172). Jonas has a similar expierence in the Giver. He is traveling to Elsewhere, and sees a sled on the top of a hill. It is